About

Hi, I’m John Howell. I lived in Bath for many years but in 2014 I and my family moved to Melbourne in search of excitement, adventure and really wild things. We found all of those, especially wild things – there are loads around here. This blog is about our explorations of this place we now call home.

My wife Ginny has written about some of the changes we’ve faced over at LivesTurnedUpsideDown, and so has my friend Val regarding both her Perth and Melbourne experiences. But this blog’s more about places, pictures and wild things.

Viewing the pictures

My animal posts just have all the pictures in them. However my places posts have links to Google Pictures albums, because they give me more space than WordPress does, and my pictures of places tend to be more detailed, partly due to a lack of exotic telephoto lenses but mostly due to a lack of patience.

Each album is about 10-20 pictures long. The images are high quality – I’ve made them suitable for up to 4K televisions if anyone has one of those yet. I’d recommend making your browser full-screen – they should automatically resize and appear nicely whether you’re using a PC browser or a tablet.

If you click on a picture you can make the images appear full-screen, and then clicking the ‘i’ button shows various geeky camera information as well as maps of where the picture was taken. However if you do this you can’t see any of the text I’ve added between photos (thanks Google).

Please note the pictures are copyrighted – if you want to use them, in particular commercially, then you need my permission. If it’s non-commercial then I’m generally happy with an attribution but please ask first.

Why’s it set up like this?

This blog started because I wanted a better way of sharing the photos I take with my family and friends. I wanted to be able to create albums, with photos were displayed well on multiple devices with some text to describe them and that didn’t cost much. Ideally I wanted to be able to manage access too, so I could share family snaps with my family and not the world, but that seems to be too hard for now. Eventually I settled on using albums created in Google Pictures and indexed by a WordPress blog – a bit clunky but it’s a start. If anyone has a better solution please let me know!

Why DimetroJohn?

Well the John Howell domain was already taken, so I had to think of a new and unique name. I’ve always had a soft spot for dimetrodon, one of my favourite dinosaurs, and with a bit of portmanteau-ing the deed was done.

Dimetrodon vs Stegosaurus from Ladybird’s Prehistoric Animals

Yes, I know dimetrodon is a synapsid and not a dinosaur, plus there were nearly 150 million years between dimetrodon and stegosaurus, which is similar to the amount of time between stegosaurus and us. But the five-year-old in me just cannot shake off the images from the Ladybird books where I first learned about him (and it was definitely a ‘him’ then). As you might imagine I had copies of both Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals, and as far as I was concerned if there was a fearsome giant reptile with nasty big pointy teeth ready to fight to the gory death with a huge herbivore, then we were unquestionably talking about a dinosaur.

Just look at him there, with his sail raffishly battered and his teeth bared, ready to go for that rather porky and somewhat embarrassed-looking stegosaurus. Who could resist?